Briefly: Given the sort of scripts studios have been buying recently, I can’t really fault a screenwriter for figuring that the couple months it takes to write a spec script “updating” classic characters and adding unrelated wild elements might be time well spent. Because while crazy stuff has been selling, from our perspective what are the chances that a studio is really going to buy Huck and Tom, a script in which Mark Twain‘s characters Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are adults in a “re-imagining of the classic duo in the vein of Snow White and the Huntsman,” with “supernatural elements.”?

Oh. Crap. Paramount bought it. Andrew Burg wrote the script — and I haven’t read it, maybe it is quite good — and Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Oblivion) are producing it with Matt Lopez (story and co-writer on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). This is just getting going, and it seems like one of those projects that could easily languish in development for a long time, if not forever. And it’s not like there has never been a bad version of these characters brought to the screen. But supernatural additions? Really? Jeez. [THR]